gradenko_2000 posted:

Tankbuster posted:

Well he was a career soldier.

skooma512 posted:

Yeah they're definitely fighting the last war with this thinking. The fact that we haven't had an actual challenge to US air superiority since Vietnam, aka over a generation after these think-tankers started their careers is also probably why they think it just solves everything and is invincible.

As for none of it making sense. Well, it never had to in a military sense, because NATO must confront Russia is not a tactical/strategy imperative, but an economic one. They need to constantly point out boogeymen to justify massive boondoggle projects.

Bar Ran Dun posted:

there is a more material explanation for bulk going to the metropole from colonies and finished goods going out and that relationship changing that doesn’t require all the words.

the container. when did the container become widespread?

quote:

In 1956, most cargoes were loaded and unloaded by hand by longshore workers. Hand-loading a ship cost $5.86 a ton at that time. Using containers, it cost only 16 cents a ton to load a ship, 36-fold savings. Containerization also greatly reduced the time to load and unload ships. McLean knew "A ship earns money only when she's at sea", and based his business on that efficiency.

quote:

By the end of the 1960s, Sea-Land Industries had 27,000 trailer-type containers, manufactured by Fruehauf, 36 trailer ships and access to over 30 port cities

quote:

As the advantages to McLean's container system became apparent, competitors quickly adapted. They built bigger ships, larger gantry cranes and more sophisticated containers. Sea-Land needed cash to stay competitive. McLean turned to Reynolds Tobacco Company, a company he knew from his trucking company days when his trucks transported Reynolds cigarettes across the United States. In January 1969, Reynolds agreed to buy Sea-Land for $530 million in cash and stock. McLean made $160 million personally[14] and got a seat on the company's board. To carry out the purchase, Reynolds formed a holding company, named R.J. Reynolds Industries, Inc., which bought Sea-Land in May 1969. That same year, Sea-Land ordered five of the largest, fastest container ships in the world - SL-7 class vessels.

crepeface posted:

they fixed all the issues in the m1a2s that australia bought right

gradenko_2000 posted:

I know "The Pentagon Wars was a documentary" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA) is a lukewarm take for a thread like this but it still brings a smile to my face that it keeps coming up

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

That's not even the funniest thing about the Sergeant York, which is that during one of its field tests the systems malfunctioned and turned the turret directly at the observers' stands. So both 40mm guns full of live ammo were aimed at all of the observers, who immediately dove for cover. Then the guns aimed down, and it dumped the entire magazine into the ground while spinning around in a circle.

Frosted Flake posted:

Much like Canada, Australia buys weapons systems based on diplomatic pressure and/or corruption.

Milo and POTUS posted:

What's a TOE infantry squad

gradenko_2000 posted:

"TOE" means "Table of Equipment", sometimes also referred as "TO&E", for "Table of Organization & Equipment"

it refers to what the on-paper/intended composition of a infantry squad: this many soldiers, with this many guns, that much ammo, and this much other equipment. A US Army infantry squad is supposed to be composed of nine soldiers.

in the context of that quote, what he's saying is that a single Bradley doesn't have enough carrying capacity to transport an entire infantry squad in one go, which is a problem in terms of keeping things organized, since you have to split a squad across multiple Bradleys, or you have to leave some soldiers behind/have them ride something else.

a quick wikipedia tells me that the BMP-3, a rough Russian equivalent to the Bradley, can carry the vehicle's commander, gunner, and driver, and then seven passengers. The M2 Bradley also has a crew of three, but can carry one fewer passenger.

Bar Ran Dun posted:

there is a more material explanation for bulk going to the metropole from colonies and finished goods going out and that relationship changing that doesn’t require all the words.

the container. when did the container become widespread?

Ardennes posted:

or that it is still crew loaded gun.

Frosted Flake posted:

What’s funny, and I know you eluded to is, this already happened!
The M26 Pershing underperformed in Korea against T34s and was revealed to have all sorts of automotive problems. So far as I know, the Marines didn’t even take their M103s to Vietnam.

BitcoinRockefeller posted:

Is that really so bad though? I haven't seen any real data either way, just internet arguments, but the fact you have an extra guy for watch/maintenance/crew casualties and a loader can get the first few rounds off as fast or faster than an autoloader, plus the fact it's one less thing that can break, make it seem like a horse apiece.

oscarthewilde posted:

recently read this fairly in-depth LRB article on containerization, found it pretty interesting

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n08/john-lanchester/gargantuanisation

gradenko_2000 posted:

I know "The Pentagon Wars was a documentary" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA) is a lukewarm take for a thread like this but it still brings a smile to my face that it keeps coming up

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

That's not even the funniest thing about the Sergeant York, which is that during one of its field tests the systems malfunctioned and turned the turret directly at the observers' stands. So both 40mm guns full of live ammo were aimed at all of the observers, who immediately dove for cover. Then the guns aimed down, and it dumped the entire magazine into the ground while spinning around in a circle.

quote:

One of the early models was reported to have locked onto a latrine fan, mistaking its return for a moving target of low-priority. Reporting on the incident in another article on the vehicle's woes, Washington Monthly reported that "Michael Duffy, a reporter for the industry publication Defense Week, who broke this aspect of the story, received a conference call in which Ford officials asked him to describe the target as a 'building fan' or 'exhaust fan' instead."[20]

Ardennes posted:

The vehicle has to be considerably larger to fit a loader that has to handle the rounds, which means significantly more weight (especially considering the armor on the Abrams). It also means a more visible vehicle, also not something that you want. There is a reason it has a turbine engine and thus limited range.

Also, the loader getting rounds quickly in the gun is more theoretical since it is a human and plenty of things can go wrong while autoloaders on Soviet tanks were known for being reliable. Also, that loader is going to get tired in a prolonged engagement, another issue.

There is a reason why everyone went to autoloaders.

(Also more recently the T 90m has extra armor around its ammo and propellent.)

Rutibex posted:

lol their lovely tank can't even travel the length of a full tank of gas before requiring maintenance

Mantis42 posted:

Mantis42 posted:

oscarthewilde posted:

recently read this fairly in-depth LRB article on containerization, found it pretty interesting

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n08/john-lanchester/gargantuanisation

quote:

Along with oil tankers, the other type of ship that has grown bigger and bigger since the 1960s is Ever Given’s category: the container vessel. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the container in the modern economy. Containers are the force which has driven the cost of shipping down, and then further down, and then down so low that it has in effect abolished itself as an economic factor. The remarkable thing about the story of the container is that it is such a simple idea that almost anyone could have had it – anyone who has ever tidied up children’s toys, for instance. The idea is that stuff is more manageable if you shove it into a box. That’s it.

This​ might not sound like a big deal. But in the world of shipping it was revolutionary: a single container which could travel from truck to train to boat to destination; which could be made to a uniform scale and was an entirely fungible unit of transport. It was the invention of the American businessman Malcolm McLean, and his achievement wasn’t so much the idea, which pretty much anyone could have had, but the relentless force with which he lobbied manufacturers, regulators, politicians, governments, unions, railway companies, shipping companies, trucking companies and port authorities to bring it into being. The first container ship, SS Ideal-X, set sail from Newark on 26 April 1956, carrying a load of 58 containers. The world caught on fast, because the container ship’s advantages were immediately obvious: speed and convenience and efficiency. The standard container of McLean’s invention, the TEU or twenty-foot equivalent unit, now dominates the world of shipping and transportation.

Before containers, workers unloading a boat might find themselves confronted, Marc Levinson says, with ‘hundred-kilo bags of sugar or twenty-pound cheeses nestled next to two-ton steel coils’. ‘Unloading bananas required the longshoremen to walk down a gangplank carrying eighty-pound stems of hard fruit on their shoulders. Moving coffee meant carrying fifteen-kilo bags to a wooden pallet placed in the hold, letting a winch lift the pallet to the dock, and then removing each bag from the pallet and stacking it atop a massive pile.’ A single ship might carry a pile of cement bags, copper bars too big for a man to carry, steel drums of beef tallow, baskets of oranges, barrels of olives, 440-pound bales of cotton. Levinson describes the cargo of one ship, the SS Warrior, in detail. On a single journey from Brooklyn to Bremerhaven it carried 5015 tons of cargo, consisting of 194,582 individual items: 74,903 cases, 71,726 cartons, 24,036 bags, 10,671 boxes, 2880 bundles, 2877 packages, 2634 pieces, 1538 drums, 888 cans, 815 barrels, 53 wheeled vehicles, 21 crates, 10 transporters, 5 reels and 1525 undetermined items. The Warrior took six days to load (including one lost to a strike), ten days to sail the Atlantic, and another four days to unload (because the American longshoremen worked one eight-hour shift but the Germans worked round the clock). So half of the total journey time was spent loading and unloading.

The container gets rid of all that labour and replaces it with a largely automated process. Ships are unloaded now in a matter of hours, with the order determined by algorithms. Nobody knows or cares what’s in the boxes: the crew’s manifest is concerned only with items that are refrigerated or dangerous. Apart from that, for the crew and the dockworkers, the containers are labelled boxes of who-knows-what. The process is fast, so fast that a whole corpus of image, story and folklore concerning sailors on shore is no longer relevant: they are only ever on shore for a few hours at a time. Much of the increasing efficiency of the process is linked to ever increasing size. In 1980, seventeen ships with a capacity of 20,000 TEU between them were sailing weekly from North America to Japan; another 23 ships were sailing from Northern Europe to North America, and eight more, with a capacity of 15,000 TEU, were sailing to Japan. Impressive: but the Ever Given alone carries 20,124 TEU. The biggest ships in the world, the Algeciras class built by the Korean company Daewoo, carry 23,964 TEU. If you lined up the containers on one of those ships in single file, they would stretch for ninety miles.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I know "The Pentagon Wars was a documentary" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA) is a lukewarm take for a thread like this but it still brings a smile to my face that it keeps coming up

Ardennes posted:

The vehicle has to be considerably larger to fit a loader that has to handle the rounds, which means significantly more weight (especially considering the armor on the Abrams). It also means a more visible vehicle, also not something that you want. There is a reason it has a turbine engine and thus limited range.

Also, the loader getting rounds quickly in the gun is more theoretical since it is a human and plenty of things can go wrong while autoloaders on Soviet tanks were known for being reliable. Also, that loader is going to get tired in a prolonged engagement, another issue.

There is a reason why everyone went to autoloaders.

(Also more recently the T 90m has extra armor around its ammo and propellent.)

quote:

The Air Force argues that the F-35 Lightning II – the branch’s sleek, stealthy and superlatively expensive next-generation fighter – will be able to carry the Warthog’s torch.

McSally disagrees. She said the F-35 is less lethal than the Warthog, and thinner-skinned; and while it’s faster, it guzzles gas, resulting in less time spent providing fire support, she said.

Compare the F-35’s cannon to the A-10’s, she said: the A-10 carries 1,174 rounds for its gun. The F-35A – the model the Air Force says will take the A-10’s place – carries 180 for its smaller, 25-millimeter cannon.

“That’s one trigger pull, okay?” McSally said. “People like to fairy-dust that away.”

Another key difference between the aircraft: While the F-35 is years overdue and billions over budget, the A-10 is being used to fight the self-proclaimed Islamic State as part of Operation Inherent Resolve.

McSally hastened to clarify the F-35’s importance: Without next-generation fighters to clear the skies and suppress air defenses, the A-10 can’t do its job. But when it must, she said, there’s no better aircraft.

“Close air support is never going to be a clean videogame, no matter how sophisticated our weapons systems are,” she said.

Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, isn’t so sure. Thanks to precision ordnance, most aircraft – including unmanned aircraft – are capable of dropping bombs within meters of their intended targets, he said.

“It’s hard for me to believe that our nation still needs, in the long run, an aircraft that was designed to be pointed at a target when we have all these other aircraft that can drop with that degree of precision,” said Gunzinger, a retired Air Force colonel and bomber pilot.

He mentioned the Small Diameter Bomb, a slender bomb specifically designed for use in close quarters. “Do we really need guns when we’re going to have better weapons in the future that can hit with greater precision?” he said. The Pentagon recently approved the SDB for production and deployment with the F-15 Strike Eagle.

While he agrees that the A-10 is a tough cut, he said it’s a cut that Congress forced the military to make, and that preserving the A-10 comes at a cost.

“If the Air Force can’t retire the oldest fighter it has, then where should they look? They’ll have to look in modernization funding,” he said, meaning the F-35 could face additional delays.

Isakson agreed that sequestration has proved painful for the Air Force: “They have a job to do, and it’s been forced on them by us, so we bear some responsibility,” he said. But he insisted that the Air Force could have made cuts elsewhere in its budget.

“There’s no single replacement,” he said.

The Air Force did not respond to requests for comment.

Frosted Flake posted:

The Georgian Army getting rolled up somehow doesn’t reflect their US support, training and equipment. The Iraqi army losing Abrams outside Mosul is already forgotten. If the Ukrainians get trashed and US equipment underperforms, for whatever intervening reason, it won’t be absorbed even after it’s observed.

Frosted Flake posted:

Australia buying Abrams when every other Leo 1 user bought either Leo 2 or their own indigenous tanks, to me, reads as US diplomatic pressure. Does anyone know the details?

Also, wrt to Loaders - I don’t know many cavalrymen, but from chit chatting with them, having four guys to do all the primary maintenance, cook, do their watch on sentry overnight, refuel, is much better than having 3.

The boring parts of soldiering get left out of the comparisons of armour thickness and firepower, but it’s 99% of the job. Having an extra guy just so you are responsible for 25% rather than 33% of things that needs to get done seems to justify it alone. May as well have him load shells while he’s at it.

Iirc this is what the “Assistant driver”, “mechanic” or whatever of the Shermans did. It wasn’t about the bow machine gun, it was about everything else. I mean, thinking about all of the sensors and poo poo that needs to be maintained on a modern MBT, how finicky some of that is as well as the powertrain, I’m a bit surprised nobody has thought about reintroducing 5 man crews. That’s a lot of work when you stop at the laager for the night.

Zeppelin Insanity posted:

They of course have a lot of downsides, but it isn't a matter of Israel being stupid and the US falling for it - the Russians have been using APS since the late 70s, longer than anyone else, and they seem pretty happy with it. Yeah, yeah, the 70s one was discontinued due to collateral damage to nearby soldiers, replaced in the 80s by an electronic one without a hard-kill component, but then a new system with hard-kill in the 90s. Not perfect, but useful.

vyelkin posted:

yeah, this is the article that really made the impact of containerization hit home for me. Key bit for anyone paywalled or time-poor:

quote:

The Warrior took six days to load (including one lost to a strike), ten days to sail the Atlantic, and another four days to unload (because the American longshoremen worked one eight-hour shift but the Germans worked round the clock). So half of the total journey time was spent loading and unloading.

indigi posted:

so Americans, working one shift, took 5 days to load it and Germans, working three shifts, unloaded it in 4. lol. Germany is butt

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Admittedly, there is also the very real possibility that the Americans were working without proper safety regulations, while the Germans were hampered by German bureaucracy.